The life indeed; a review, in terms of common thinking, of the Scripture history issuing in immortality

Front matter

Book. Cr3S

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

John Franklin Genung, by John Mason Tyler . . vii

I. On the Larger Scale i

II

HOW THE SOUL OF MANHOOD FARES IN MORTAL ENVIRONMENT AND RUDIMENTAL BEGINNINGS

I. The Empire of Law and Fate

II. The Advent of the Spirit

III. Early Spiritual Reactions

IV. The Burden and the Craving

II

WHEN the sage Koheleth, looking abroad over the world both of things and of men, said, "Everything hath He made beautiful in its time, also He hath put eternity in their heart/' he was living consciously in a confused and cloudy era, was speaking out of the heart of a twilight stratum of personality, which indeed he recognized as such. The finish of the sentence is, "yet not so that man findeth out the work which God hath wrought from the beginning and to the end." He sees himself midway in a great tide of being, of which the beginning and the end puzzle his reason ; but there is a power urging him on which he names Eternity, and which, whatever it may come eventually to mean, gives all the beauty of the world its excuse for existing. Not a midnight this, but a twilight, wherein there is light enough to steer by, and wherein already, in the very heart of it, there is promise of a coming dawn. A friend of mine has lately put this thought of Koheleth's into the familiar metre of Omar Khayyam, extracting thereby its fragrance and poetic beauty: —

In my own breast beats on Eternity.

No mirage towers of Dreamlands yet to be,

But — once I bent to taste an upland spring And, bending, heard it whisper of its Sea.

I shape it not from perishable clay,

Nor muse on clouds and hope to make them stay,

But as the patient shell secretes the pearl So I secrete my Heaven from day to day.

This gentle radiance of spiritual illumination, giving every darkest era enough light to live and find its destiny by, is no more and no less than the Bible elsewhere avers. It does not shun the most seeming hopeless places. St. Paul, looking straight into the unspeakable corruption of his Roman times, thus describes it: 'Tor the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead." This is not a mere Jew-bounded utterance, for he speaks with his eye on all the Gentile nations ; nor is it a truth of manhood alone, for his purview is generous enough to take in the world of things as well as of men. He is enunciating an elemental truth. In a word, our scripture period of evolution not only begins with the vitalizing Spirit of God, but has the nourishing power of that Spirit, as much as it needs and can use, all along the way.

Our study, it will be borne in mind, is a study of light: how life and immortality were brought to light. We are undertaking to estimate the life of the world, in its various eras, by the amount and nature of the light it had to grow by. Light, so to say, is our testing and measuring instrument. Let us, in imitation of our scientific brothers, call it by an appropriate Greek name, our biometer. We may begin with the twilight; we need go no farther back, because, as we have just seen, our scripture estimate recognizes no absolute darkness. I have called this initial period the twilight stratum, instead of the twilight era. We get into the way, overmuch perhaps, of judging things according to the limiting conditions of time. We must in a measure discard that here. The tides of the informing spirit, we need to premise, are flowing through a hidden history wherein the bounds of space and time are lost, wherein one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as one day. So instead of saying there was a time when life lay in twilight, we had better say there is a stratum, a level, in human nature, existing as truly to-day as it ever did, wherein the soul moves in twilight dimness, seeing as through a glass darkly. We are not dealing, therefore, with ancient history, some long past analogy which we translate into terms of to-day; we are dealing with the thing itself, literal and present. We do not even have to go to the Turks and Buigarians to find it; rather, from our purest heights of vision we can all look down into ourselves and see there levels and standards of living which, unless illumined from above, yield only dimness of outlook. The abysms of our nature are all there still, the underworld of crude instinct and earthly response to environment. We never get so far above this but that there come up echoes, however faint and far, of the "call of the wild." We may have risen above the tyranny of such things, but if so we have absorbed them, not abolished them. Or we may figure it scientifically, as soon as we see in man a being in process of evolution. The embryonic life of the body, they say, passes in swift epitome through the inchoate stages of nature: it is a unicellular germ, it breaks up by fission, is a vegetable, a sponge, a fish-like organism, successively, before it takes on any semblance of man. Is the case less true of the embryonic life of the spirit? Must not it too have its period of development in bondage and immaturity and dimness, before it can see its parent Spirit as He is, and before it can see whither it is bound? Well, this embryonic period is the twilight stratum of manhood, the level of life wherein by the nature of the case, the immortal outlook is not yet in sight.

Of this spiritual evolution of ours we have already become aware, doubtless, of another differentiating trait; it is connoted by the fact that manhood, when the Bible first sees it, has already won to the region of twilight and is no longer moving in utter gloom. Evolution, in its lower biologic stages, is figured as a blind fate-like thing, wherein the organism is wholly unconscious and passive, acted upon by mysterious forces which it cannot control or understand. The highest name that can be given to its motions is natural selection; the highest motive, survival of the fittest. That is the way evolution looks, and that may indeed be an incident of its rudimental stage; though, as a matter of fact, we cannot tell hov/ far down consciousness begins, or how soon a spiritual impulse strikes into the game, and there are even those who think that all nature is alive, each thing with will and consciousness enough to fulfil its appointed function. With these speculations, however, we have nothing to do. We stand on plainer ground. In the stage to which we have attained, evolution is in progress in a being already endowed with reason and a will of his own; a being of whom the quaint Bible record says, ''And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." In him therefore evolution has gained the self-conscious stage: has reached the point where the organism, no longer mere passive clay, no longer even an unsharing spectator from without, can see its life from within; can cast itself intelligently on life, and cooperate in its own development. So much outfit of life it has, though still in twilight. This is a very momentous element of the case. From this point onward, then, evolution is no longer a blind and arbitrary thing, but increasingly charged with wisdom and light. Already, too, it is deeply prophetic of its august goal, in the fact that it can share, in all its wealth of mind and ideal and will, in the mind of the Father of spirits from whom it comes. The organism now being evolved is a thinking organism. Its moulding power still comes, as absolutely as ever, from the mysterious Reality without; but its light comes from within, or rather by way of the manhood spirit within.

We must speak now in nobler terms than we apply to crystals and germ-cells; in terms of personality. For while the progressive discovery of the path of life may still be like obeying nature forces, like the fire ascending to seek the sun, or the magnetic needle vibrating loyally to the great earth-currents of the pole, yet it expresses itself in the idiom of free strong manhood : it is the son seeking the Father and the ways of the Father's home, and the glory of the family likeness. This it truly is, however for a time it may stumble among dark mountains, or render a dim and wavering allegiance, or even by its own will incur bondage to the conditions of its existence. For its twilight is gradually brightening toward day; its ordered steps are leading in the direction of freedom.

I. THE EMPIRE OF LAW AND FATE

We are now ready to consider what the Bible conceives to be the essential character of this twilight stratum of life. A late scripture writer, tracing the expression of this to a commanding personage, and to its national aspect, says, ''The law was given by Moses," — by law meaning the whole comprehensive dispensation before his time, as it is interpreted from an era of greater light. On our cosmic scale, which in spite of its racial unit is truly the scale of the Bible, we may call this the empire of law and fate. It is just the thing that is most plainly and universally before us, saints and scientists alike: the human soul, which never asked or chose to be breathed into earthly life, pursuing its activities here a little while, and finding out the principles and order of them, then suddenly, without will of its own, disappearing into the unseen again. It is the most elemental picture that man can draw of his own mortal existence: the background on which all the colors and shadings of Kfe appear. That this compendious assessment of life is reduced to the term law, and that this law, however rudimentally revealed, becomes a reign of law, and empire over all the centres and outlying provinces of human nature, is not only a deduction of science, a matter of pride for these latter days; it is the recognized commonplace of Scripture, by which its large record of life is defined in two coordinated and correlated halves. If the higher and illuminate hemisphere of life is grace and truth, as these came by Jesus Christ, no less truly its lower and basal hemisphere is law, as this is identified with Moses. In other words, this was the essential character of what we call the Old Testament dispensation; distinguishing it from, and perhaps contrasting it to, what a deep-seeing later thinker called "the dispensation of the fulness of times."

That this empire of law coincides with a twilight stratum of life is indicated historically by the fact that the Old Testament man, from his determining standard of law, has not yet discovered immortality, except as a vague longing and dread. The life beyond, to him, is not a motive and inspiration, but an enigma; is not really a life at all, but a sort of punctuation mark to earth, a virtual stoppage and negation of life; which at its sternest is figured as an austere paying-off of old scores in the coin of rewards and punishments, and at its mercifulest does not get beyond the idea of release and rest. Under this law empire the human soul is, so to say, caught and tamed; is brought under the all-encompassing domination, I had almost said tyranny, of prescription and prohibition. And as long as he is there he is not consciously the son of God, but the slave and culprit of God, who can hardly choose but err, or the puppet of God, moved by the unchosen strings of his being's law. It is best not to mince matters here: this, reduced to lowest terms, is the real state of the case. No doubt it is right; I dare say it ought to be so; at any rate it is so. The empire of law becomes an empire of fate, which the thought of another life, turned back in recompense or retribution on this, only accentuates.

I hardly need pause here to say, that in this matter we are simply following, at a somev/hat higher level, the ascertained order of nature. If there is any one thing that has become thoroughly ingrained in men's minds, as the fruit of the scientific movement of the last century, that has been made the corner-stone and basis of all the rest, it is the idea that we are living under an all-encompassing, inexorable empire of law. It is just this idea that has made us so nervous about miracles and the supernatural or extra-natural; filling, as it does, the universe so full that there seems no room for anything else. It has got into literature as intolerantly as into science: we are impatient of things like the Arabian Nights and Gulliver's Travels, which deal with freaks and marvels, and relegate these to the nursery where fairy tales are more in order ; while even there the children are learning to say, ''Of course it isn't so, the author just said so." Everywhere we are adjusting ourselves, have adjusted ourselves, to a reign of law. And everywhere, too, we have, in spite of ourselves, very largely conformed our imagination to a reign of fate, wherein, always at an untimely moment,

Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,

And slits the thin-spun life.

That is why the idea of immortality still persists as a longing and a dread, or at highest as a safety and a rest, but not really as a life, or as a welcomed birth to nobler things. One thinks of the vague fears and apprehensions that connect themselves with accidents and catastrophes of nature, and chances of sudden death, as if all beyond our control were chaotic and unordered; and then one thinks, by contrast, of that Man who sailed our earthly seas, and who, when the storm was fiercest and disciples were frantic with terror, was quietly asleep on a pillow. The contrast goes deep. It takes hold of the roots of life. We cannot reason it away; our emancipation from such fears must come quite otherwise; and the large scripture way is the only v/ay to bring it about; it comes, so to say, only by the way of the Son of man. Still, quite apart from the proof or illustration of it, the deep contrast remains: a contrast in mood, attitude, tone, between the soul consciously subject to unchosen law and blind fate, and the soul consciously sharing life with the Wisdom and Spirit of the universe. And this is what, in the sequel of our study, the contrast will amount to. It is the unforced consciousness of things, the spirit oppressed or hopeful, that counts in life, not the labored logic by which we try to persuade our minds. We shall follow life to the point where, in the face of storm and mystery, it can calmly rest its head on a. pillow; can bask, as it were, in the light to which it has won, knowing that all is well.

But we must traverse a twilight period first, just as also nature must. And the felt empire of law and fate, which gives tone to that period, is a sound and sturdy stratum of life; it develops the principle, the stamina, the strong fibre, by which the soul can do its work in the world, and build its ideals of character. It learns to love its reign of law, and it lays its foundations deep beneath the surface; and though it moves in dimness of outlook, yet the night has its stars and its brightening East, and God gives it also songs in the night and compensating joys.

It would be very interesting, if we had the space, to follow into detail the dominance of law, gradually widening and deepening, from its rudimental beginnings to the darkest hour of its twilight, just before the dawn. All we can do, however, is to touch on a few salient points. The Hebrew word for law, torahj did not to begin with have just the meaning that we have come to attribute to the term, when we speak, for instance, of English law, or of the laws of nature; though it did approach the modern meaning afterward, as it was seen to cover more of life and the world. We have divested it of personality; it has become to our consciousness a sort of mechanical thing, a fate, which renders no account of itself. With the Hebrew, on the contrary, the personal origin of law was of its very essence; in his mind to legislate, to give tor ah as he expressed it, meant nearly the same as to give orders or instruction, as a general gives orders to his army, or as a teacher gives instruction to his class. Further, its ultimate source was always thought of as God Himself; the form it took in the mouth of lawgiver or priest or prophet never dispelled this idea; and accordingly, to the end of the chapter, the authority of law, torahy was accepted as absolute. That is, the personal will of God was to the Hebrew practically the same as the order of nature is to us; and his personality, in following that will, went through a development quite analogous to what we recognize in our bodies, in the laws of evolution, heredity, growth, and indeed, when we understand his quaint but seminal Hebrew idiom, identical with what we trace in the human mind, in basal rudiments, customs, institutions, history. Time fails me, of course, to enlarge on this, as given in the Old Testament; but it is all there, and all in a natural and self -evidencing order. It seems to have been the world mission of the Semitic race, as Professor McCurdy points out, to furnish the type, the norm of things, for the Aryan race to take up and fill out in arts and civilization. "In nearly everything vital to human well-being," he says, ''the Semites were the founders or forerunners." And the seminal principles of life, the pioneer impulses, are best depicted in this book of theirs, which just on that account has become the Bible of the educated and civilized world.

We speak, in biology, of the law of the species, that rigid law by which every animal instinctively conforms to the ways of its kind. A blind law, our thoughts make this, a law which the animal has no mind to reason out, and no choice but to obey. Well, the Hebrew law was just a kind of magnified law of the species; only, being personal and conscious, he went into it with his eyes open; and its appeal was always made to his reason as well as to his instinct. In other words, from the very beginning he was expected and encouraged to cooperate with it. There was a two-fold element in it; and the power of two worlds, the austere under-world of his primordial nature, and the free upper-world of his manhood. But for the rest, he never got beyond the tether of his species consciousness. He merely spread it out into wider areas: from the family, taking its law from a patriarchal head, to the clan, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau; then to the tribe, tracing up allegiance to a common ancestor; then through slavery and deliverance and conquest to the nation, which for the first time could begin to legislate and write its laws for permanent use, on stone; then finally, as nationality failed, to a race. That is as far as the Hebrew, as such, ever got. To this day the Hebrews remain a race apart, with an intense, exclusive, almost fanatical race consciousness, virtually the species consciousness writ large. It remained for the Aryan race to take up the matter where they laid it down, and develop the regards of men from Judaism to Christianity, from the nation and the race to the world and the universal humanity. They might indeed have done this, and their Pioneer, of their own royal line, was ready; if they had not, in an evil hour, perversely chosen to reject Him, and thus commit their manhood to an arrested development. The result is before us, for the world to see; the enlarging humanitarian consciousness of our latest age is every day making it plainer.

But to go back to the spirit of their old law. Its main effort and impact, as you know, was prohibition and restraint: always directed to curbing and bringing into order the imperious surge of the natural man toward lawless freedom. It took men as we take children, saying, ^'You mustn't do this, you mustn't touch that, you mustn't." You have noted how all the commandments of the two tables, except one, are prohibitions, "Thou shalt not"; they recognize the things to which men too naturally tend, and put the bridle there. "Ye shall not do," said Moses to them at the outer edge of the wilderness, "ye shalt not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes." It was a kind of negative life that was thus contemplated. We can imagine some progressive minded man in his audience breaking in here and saying, "You have told us what not to do, but when we have obeyed your prohibitions to the full where are we then? What shall we do? How shall we take this tabula rasa of a life and enrich it? The decks are cleared for action, all the clutter and impedimenta removed by your 'Thou shalt nots'; now where is the foe to fight, where is the victory to win? All that you have left us positively to do, barring some ceremonies and sanitary rules, is to honor our fathers and mothers; but we must be fathers and mothers some day; how then shall we in turn be ourselves worthy of honor, and especially in the new conditions of action that times will surely bring?" Well, that was left to the future, to the time when they would be out of the wilderness, and be no longer scolded children but full-grown men, adult and ready to act for themselves. "For ye are not as yet come," said the venerable lawgiver, "to the rest and to the inheritance which the Lord your God giveth you." His law was made for a consciously unfinal stage of manhood; and so it remained to the end, not because it was inadequate or unwise or not voluminous enough, but precisely because it was law. The law, the police regulation of the world, operates to protect society and keep men out of — or put them into — jail; but what life, what ideal, what spiritual energy, does it, as law, put within them? Clearly, it represents only the negative half of a divided whole; and all that makes positive manhood, according to the Maker's image, is beyond.

From these rudiments of law, wherein we see men just going under the yoke, our thoughts go out to an empire of law, wherein a universe is caught and tamed; we try to think what the world would be like if it were what the biologists want it to be, a world of law and nothing else. We look into the animal world, which God created and called very good; and there we note the species, each in its own compartment of nature, each with its species consciousness and obeying its species law. What do these different species, all from one Creator, do? They fear one another; they fight one another; they devour one another. There seems to be a law in their members impelling them to it. Poets have brooded over it, as if the world were radically cruel and unfeeling; they call it ''nature red in tooth and claw." And yet all this seems mellow music compared with what goes on all the while among us. The law of our digestive organs calls for animal food; and what is that army of our species out there in the Chicago shambles doing all day long, and year after year, but kill, kill, kill, — that we may eat the flesh? Or if we have scruples against such slaughter, and, choosing rather to be underfed and anaemic, confine ourselves to vegetable food, we have only removed the matter one step back, we are still destroying the protoplasmic life of lower creatures to build up our own bodies. The law in our members, the law of our species, demands it; there seems to be no consideration of mercy or sympathy or even justice in the matter. It is all unrelieved law: nature preserving her integrity and uniformity, calm and severe, yet beneath the surface full of fear and fighting and devouring.

Is it essentially different when we come to the domain of the higher law, as unrelieved law I mean, with its rigid standards on the one hand, its atmosphere of bondage and restraint on the other? What sort of world would this be if the Old Testament dispensation had been perpetual, and had remained unrelieved by more genial elements, that magnified law of the species of which I was speaking a few minutes ago? Well, we have a historical example, in our own modern times, to illustrate it for us. We honor the Puritans, and trace much of our noblest and strongest convictions of right and conscience to them. But once in their history they got their doctrines and sentiments a little out of balance, and reverted overmuch to the earlier ways, when the reign of Mosaic law was unrelieved by grace and. truth. This is how Macaulay describes it:

"After the fashion of oppressed sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety, encouraged in themselves by reading and meditation a disposition to brood over their wrongs, and, when they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined that they were only hating the enemies of heaven. In the New Testament there was little indeed which, even when perverted by the most disingenuous exposition, could seem to countenance the indulgence of malevolent passions. But the Old Testament contained the history of a race selected by God to be witnesses of his unity and ministers of his vengeance, and specially commanded by him to do many things which, if done without his special command, would have been atrocious crimes. In such a history it was not difficult for fierce and gloomy spirits to find much that might be distorted to suit their wishes. The extreme Puritans therefore began to feel for the Old Testament a preference, which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow even to themselves; but which showed itself in all their sentiments and habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which they refused to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus and the epistles of Paul have come down to us. They baptized their children by the names, not of Christian saints, but of Hebrew patriarchs and warriors. In defiance of the express and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned the weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primitive times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish Sabbath. They sought for principles of jurisprudence in the Mosaic law, and for precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in the books of Judges and Kings. Their thoughts and discourse ran much on acts which were assuredly not recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the blood of a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of plighted faith, and of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping under the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to Christians suffering under the tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were subjected to a code resembling that of the synagogue, when the synagogue was in its worst state."

A trenchant indictment this; we leave out of the question whether Macaulay exaggerated it, or left it too one-sided. What we are to note here is that this describes not merely an era in history but a stratum of human nature. What is all this but a reversion to the twilight stratum? Given such and such conditions, let the prevailing sentiment, even the sacred zeal of divine law, be too unrelieved and too intolerant, and the Puritan of the seventeenth century after Christ becomes at heart like the Jew of the prechristian centuries; he has magnified that law of the species and of the race until he can hardly let other species and races exist, or at least can hardly let exist what they stand for and what perhaps has been bred in the law of their being.

Yet all this time Jews and Puritans alike have, as St. Paul says, consented to the law that it is holy and just and good; have rejoiced in it after the inward man. The empire of law has engendered ideals; nay the ideal of its own perfection and universality, the ideal of its sacredness and unsearchable depth, was at the bottom of that Puritan intolerance and narrowness. The very law of the species, with its fear and its fighting, is ideally the integrity of the species. All the ideals of character that rose in the mind of the Old Testament worthies merely reflected this fact at different sides and angles. The stern yet tonic ideal of duty, what is this but giving every obligation, every responsibility, every law of our being, its just due? The comprehensive ideal of righteousness again, which is the high summit to which Old Testament conduct tends, what is this? '^In this word righteousness," says Brierly, '' . . .we need beware lest we take an emotional substitute for the actual meaning. For, in heaven and upon earth, it has only one meaning, rightness, which again means always conformity to the law of things. In all her myriad departments. Nature has one rule of conduct towards us. She pays according to our conformity to her law." In this ideal, then, we have merely the law of great nature writ large, and made into an empire over our sturdiest and severest character. God Himself, too, is a God of righteousness; He embodies His own law. Or take the highest ideal of all, remote, withdrawn, the ideal that mystics have appropriated to themselves and that seems inaccessible to common and lay humanity, — the ideal of holiness. 'This latter word," says Brierly again, ''we now recognize as signifying neither less nor more than 'wholeness.' It means the full equipment of manhood, the highest state of body, soul, and spirit." Well, what is being a whole man, but having all the functions in vital running order, rejoicing to obey the laws of their being? The empire of law creates a demand for its own perfection; it is inexorable, intolerant if you please; it will not be satisfied until it has drawn into its jurisdiction the whole man and every man.